Calling Them As I See Them

When I told my teenage sons that I
was considering trying my hand
at being a movie critic, they
emphatically advised against
it.

"You can't do that!" They
said. "You're too judgmental!"

Me? Judgmental?
"What do they know?" I thought. They're just kids!

The movie critic idea
eventually evolved, and expanded, to include critiques about daily life, and
"stuff" in general. My boys were less than supportive.

"That won't work either!" They
insisted. "Who wants to hear what you have to say?"

Hmm...sounds a bit judgmental to me, but let's think about that for a moment.

Who wants to hear my opinions?
Obviously, not my kids! They
don't seem to care when I tell them that, where I grew up, boys didn't wear
bracelets, girls didn't leave the house with the belt of their pants hanging
below their hips, and piercings were for the ears only. When I issue an
unpopular curfew, or veto a "road trip," my kids promptly inform me that I "don't know what it's all
about." My way of looking at things, they believe, is "different" (for lack of a
better word.) I assure you that my viewpoint is not skewed. The only thing
that's different is the outlook of the
separate generations. I merely call things as I see them.

Granted, I don't see as well as I used to. My once keen eyesight has been somewhat reduced to a hopeful
squint. I recall sitting in my parents' kitchen several years back, listening to my
father tell me how he bent to pick a "dust bunny" off the carpet, and was
shocked to discover a silverfish in his hand. (How he managed to catch a
squiggly silverfish is beyond me; his eyesight deceived him, but his reflexes
were right-on.) I remember
thinking: "how on earth could he mistake a
silverfish for a piece of dust?" Fast forward sixteen years: I was
taking a shower the other day when something dark beneath the shower curtain
caught my eye. I shook the curtain to release what I thought was a glob of
shower gel. Now you tell me: how did I mistake a cricket for shower gel? (And
how did the creepy thing get into my bathtub?) I was more than a little
disturbed! The cricket quickly met a wet demise, and I realized I may not see
things clearly all the time...like the "rabbit" that sat, immovable, for hours
at the far end of my backyard one afternoon. Rocks are like that, you
know.

Perhaps my
teenagers have a valid point. I don't see as well as I used to, and I am,
admittedly, a bit behind the times, often happily so. But I know one thing for
certain: life is a cycle. I now stand where my father once stood, as the parent
with the unpopular viewpoint, the parent that sometimes "doesn't know what it's
all about." The cycle moves forward. Someday, through the grace of God, my kids
will be in my shoes, and they'll realize that not everything is what it seems,
and Mom wasn't quite so out of sync after-all.